A very interesting seminar at Microsoft Gulf offices sub-titled Faster year end Close was attended by participants from as far a field as KSA, Bahrain and Fujeirah.
After welcome and introduction by Executive Director Jennifer Vaz, her co -Director Stephen Jones outlined the reasons to adopt a formal system, the factors to consider, and presented some research and analysis and statistics by the Aberdeen Group on what a signifcant difference this makes to the bottom line results of companies.
Kevin Ashby, Application Platform Marketing Manager, Microsoft Gulf then discussed the power of the Microsoft technology platform that underpins the unified Prophix solution – starting with SQL 2012 with SSIS, and SSAS, SSRS, and integration with SharePoint, then looking at the analytical powers provided by Power Pivot, Power View, and a look at how Hadoop will support ‘Big Data’.
Prophix VP and International Partner Manager Alok Ajmera had flown in from Canada over the weeked and showed no sign of jet lag when he gave a stimulating presentation backed by industry reserach from Gartner, BPM and other industry bodies. His final thoughts were that if you don’t have a CPM solution now, then you will have one within 5 years, and that the leaders in adoption are significantly outperforming the laggards – so, the sooner the better!
Srinivasan Subramanian from Danaone gave an insight into his Company’s sucessful implementation of Prophix both for Financial budgeting and Sales and operational planning. He emphasised lessons learned e.g. not to underestimate the work of migrating legacy data. he cited a major busienss benefit of end users being able to access on-line and up-to-date relevant budget performance information by user specified dimensions without being dependent on the finance department. Automated workflow processes and a ‘report binder’ for scheduled report distribution were other key benefits highlighted. This session triggered many user questions.
After break, Synergy Principal Consultant Byron Napwora presented an overview of the key system components and features followed by a live demonstration. Again a lively question and answer suggestion followed indicating the great interest of the participants and the discussions continued in one-on-one sessions throughout lunch.
Still time to join us tomorrow at Abu Dhabi.
